Why did I build Painless Time Tracker?

It’s a story about building a product I needed myself.

7WebPages Trello browser extension

A bit of background. I’m Yura Kriachko, maker of the app. In 2012 I have founded software development agency 7webpages.com. Later it has grown to 10 people working remotely. We were working on a set of projects, both fixed price and time and materials models. We needed to track time to prepare invoices for the end clients, to estimate how much project does cost for the agency, and to know how much to pay for the employees with a flexible schedule.

Initial approach to the time tracker

We were using Trello at that time as a task manager. Trello did not have a time tracker functionality built in so we had to quickly implement browser extension. The extension would add a start/stop button to each card with an indication of total time spent on the task by you.

It was in use for several years, but that was not the most convenient interface. Often you forget to start the tracker and then you miss some billable hours or you forget to stop it and then you have to try to recover real-time spend and edit timesheets.

Wakatime inspired tracking based on activity

Once, our colleague Mykyta found a nice tool named Wakatime that had a promise to help us a lot with time tracking. The tool would need to be installed as a plugin to your text editor and then it can record your activity including git commits, git branches and you could assign the folder you are working with to the project. That was convenient, but it was quite pricy (~50 USD per person per month) and it was totally not clear how to track other activities like meetings with clients. Eventually, Wakatime changed its model to collect metrics for software developers.

7WebPages Micromanager auto tracking based on git commits and messages in the project management tools

We have tried to incorporate ideas into the next iteration of our custom build project management software. It was named “micromanager”. When you work on a project you would need to name a git branch with a task code or include code into the commit message. Each time you commit it would automatically log 30 minutes for you, if you commit more often then once per 30 min it would handle it properly. The same time periods were adding automatically when you add a comment on the task.

It was a great initiative to commit often and actively collaborate on the task. However, it was quite annoying and was requiring doing all those extra messages or commits even if you just reading about a possible solution in the documentation.

Time tracking at Fox-IT

Several years ago I have moved to the Netherlands from Ukraine and started to work for cyber-security company Fox-IT as a full-time contractor. As a contractor, I had hourly pay so I had to provide timesheets at the end of each month. Moreover, all full-time permanent employee had to fill timesheets as well. They were quite simple, the system looks almost like an excel spreadsheet where you could specify on which project/task you were working in each of the hours from the 8 working hours. I liked this system a lot because it would force you to think where exactly did you spend each working hour. It fixes the typical problem of a start/stop tracker, where if miss some hour, you usually never check why and where was in lost. However, it was quite a challenge to fill them at the end of the week if I forget to do it every day. I had to think hard and remember all that I was doing.

Time tracking at Nurtio and Scoutbee

Next step of my journey is to join young German startup scoutbee.com. I was invited by ex-colleague from 7webpages. It was mostly full time work there and as well was working part-time on nurtio.com.

With Nurtio we were going through the startup incubation program and one of the lectors proposed to use “Slicing pie” approach to convert hours we are spending on the project of equity we would receive. Both projects needed time inventory to simply understand what is the compensation has to be.

With Nurtio we have used Toggle to track time within our team. I absolutely hated it! I would give up doing that if the compensation would not be connected to it. The problem was that when I switch from task to task or from project to project I had to interrupt my flow and press that start/stop button. Every time I forget to track something I had to painfully try to recover that part. I was looking into calendar events, into browser history, into chat messages. It was so irritating that I started to skip weeks of time tracking and then it was even more painful to recover that.

However, for Scoutbee I did not need detalization by tasks so I was simply marking in calendar time periods when I was not working for them. And the days / time slots I was working on scoutbee I have tried to do it as more dedicated as possible. It was way simpler because calendar events are naturally part of my daily routine and it helps to visualize how time is spent. At the end of the month, I would simply go through events and move time periods to google sheets where I generate time reports.

Painless Time Tracker

Having all those insights in mind I decided to build PainlessTracker, a tool to take all the best features from the findings I went through.

- A tool that would be non-intrusive as possible, which would not require any extra actions during daily work.
- A tool that would make impossible to lose an hour worked for some project
- A tool that would make it convenient to prepare timesheets, even if it’s made them at the end of the week or even month

In other words, it has to remove all the pain I had with time inventory.

We are currently in beta phase and have special conditions for early adopters. Check it out on https://painlesstracker.com